By Matthew Gurewitsch [NY Times, 14 January 2010]

IN 2001 Gotham Chamber Opera opened its doors at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with what was billed as the American stage premiere of the teenage Mozart’s moral allegory “Il Sogno di Scipione,” set in the Temple of Heaven. Now, after nine years spent establishing a repertory of rarities from Monteverdi to Piazzolla, the company is preparing its next space adventure. The vehicle this time is Haydn’s comedy “Il Mondo Della Luna” (“The World on the Moon”), to be presented, with unassailable if quixotic logic, in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History beginning on Tuesday evening.